The DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) introduced in 1995 is a compact disc with vastly increased capacity featuring high quality digital videos on a single disc. DVD features with a capacity of 4.7 gigabytes i.e. 7 times larger than CD with 680 megabytes. Sony played a key role in creating a single, unified standard for DVD formats and influenced largely on every link of DVD chain, from MPEG2 encoders manufacturing, disc drives and decoding devices. Sony DVDs are designed to record data with best possible precision with outstanding picture quality.

Sony DVD format meets the requirements of all major electronic industries. With its movie playback format and ROM format, it meets the specific requirements for motion picture industries and computer industries. DVD looks similar to CD with 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick. Its Non-Contact laser optics affords the playback without wear and tear and its disc based format provides a split second random access that cannot be achieved through any other tape format.

Sony is an active participant in MPG and a primary developer of MPG systems. Sony adopts MPG-2 encoding for compressing the data. Sony DVD features a single layered disc which produces over 2 hours of high quality digital video and a dual-layer disc which can hold around 8 hours of high-quality videos.  It provides a special effect playbacks like ‘Still’, ‘Step’, ‘slow’, ‘fast’ and ‘scan’. It provides on screen menus and interactive features. DVD also features playback of VCD’s, MP3 CD’s, MP3 DVD’s and files with other formats can also be played like DIVX and MPG-4. DVD provides the ability to support eight languages and 32 subtitles.

With such a wide spread features, it is imperative to have high capacity/high performance drivers to use these DVD’s. Sony has excelled in this sector with its class of the art DVD players and DVD-ROM’s. DVD-ROM provides 12 times the greater capacity than CD-ROM. Sony DVD players provide an excellent picture and sound quality.

With all these features, DVD has dominated the home video market. DVD is set to become a next-generation leader in optical media for computers, multimedia and video games. This reflects the readiness for the creative applications DVD could provide in the years to come. Sony was a major player in inventing the compact Discs. The current DVD standards reflect Sony excellence with MPEG2 Compression and error correction technology.